The desert was flatland, here. Off on the horizon were swooping, sloping canyons and rocks that jutted from the landscape in precarious fingers. They were so far-off that they looked purple. Farther than that would be vast mountains and valleys, the homes of dryland dragons.

Over here, though, Athalie, Ethel, and Darling had smaller fry to toy with.

A wind flicked at them in a way it wasn’t supposed to: a gentle hit unnaturally low. Nobody had sensed it was off but Athalie, though a mere halfling wasn’t supposed to have any such power. Maybe that was a demonic trait Nyx would have to curb in the dungeon, but for now, fuck it and go with it.

More low winds hit them, all in the space of a second. Lightly curved. The ones that didn’t hit Nyx's armor directly “hit” them in subtle reverberations the same way water ripples in a pond. They were shocked by how sensitive they were to the change. Were they attuned to it because they'd just come out of constant tip-toeing in the underworld? Or had they really, honest-to-goodness evolved that capacity? They chose to assume the latter, to give themself a bit of a mood boost.

They moved, and that was the only cue Darling and Ethel needed to follow suit.

A chorus of whipping wind struck them from all angles. Each part was a distinct “cut” of wind, its own razor. Clothes and flesh tore at the touch. Nerves screamed.

Ethel and Darling had braced themselves and now stood surrounded by their own arms, new cuts leaking blood and aura. Nyx had also been cut—across the face, and with shockingly deep gashes halfway through they bracers—but they’d attacked through it, flung Athalie's sword free. It pointed forward and launched a beam of light across the flatland, through bushes, and into the forehead of a storm jackal who’d thought itself hidden.

The jackal yiped and collapsed, landing sideways in the dirt.

“You two keep at it!” cried Nyx. They were sprinting off toward the jackal’s body, now while the soul was guaranteed good.

The jackal hadn’t been alone—all three of them knew that—and its pack could either retreat or converge. The pack chose to converge. With every step nearer, each one whipped its tail and sent another shock of wind lashing out at sonic speed.

The typical key to fighting storm jackals, as Nyx had demonstrated, was to break out of the wind and strike fast despite the pain.

Darling was an easily repaired automation, so she didn’t give a shit about that. She just picked a direction where an odd bit of greenish-orange fur happened to stick out from the brush, surrounded herself with four arms’ worth of barricades, retrieved two blades with the others, and charged.

But Ethel hadn’t been in the field for almost a year now. Even in the sheriff’s office, she’d played psychic second fiddle to a hand-to-hand warrior and a gunbuster. She had grown up a wimp and continued to fear that she’d die a wimp.

As the wind-whips started to strike up a minor tornado around her, she procrastinated for precious seconds, ducking her head below her forearms, feeling cuts bite into her leather. She wondered if she’d ever—

Wait, she knew better than this.

Suddenly quick on the draw, she slid a telhorn from one of the two sheaths at her belt. She poked a finger into a single hole, activated the only spell she’d had the time and patience to set as of now. It had been easy enough to concoct, and in her head she simply called it “gunfire.”

Another jackal yiped.

This one hadn’t been hit in the skull like Nyx's, and the hit was not at all clean like Ethel intended. A jet-shower of blood burst from the jackal’s chest with a dull thump, and Ethel figured her mental blast had hit mostly bone. Instead of falling, the jackal staggered and barked.

Ethel smiled. It wasn’t great, but it was something!

When in doubt, fire four more times. Psychic gunfire riddled the jackal’s chest, leaving, at last, a messy kill.

Okay, four shots was too much. Ethel felt a creeping headache now, an urge to massage the back of her head. Still, this was much better than using mind magic without a staff.

Though staves sometimes made magic weaker, they compensated by honing the power they did transmit, which conserved the user’s strength, energy, and concentration. Ethel could tell that each individual bullet-sting was worth less than the single explosion that had destroyed the rafters of Ta-Gelkiyr’s library-like escape room, but she could also tell that the benefits outweighed the cost, and that a Fire Blast was worth less than a Flamethrower.

Speaking of flames, maybe she would get a chance to test out her last-minute addition to this telhorn before the day was done...

Ethel turned to another crop of jackals, a growing pack opposite Darling’s prey and her swirling, reckless blades. She ran her thumb along an orange-red soul gem squeezed tightly into the lowest front hole of this telhorn.

(If it went wrong, the whole weapon would probably go to crap, since wood...you know...burns. But if it went right it’d look pretty cool.)